


Sand

by Rhyolight



Series: Advice for the Lovelorn [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: But only a bit, Friendship, M/M, Pre Reichenbach, no insult was intended to 15-year-old-girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-10 17:37:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolight/pseuds/Rhyolight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade thinks John should be aware. John would really, really rather not be.</p><p> </p><p>Not part of the Recovery Position universe, unless you want it to be. Not much reason why not, really.<br/>Somewhat of a sequel to Advice for the Lovelorn; followed by Unwrapping, http://archiveofourown.org/works/1520948</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“D’you think that poor daft bugger will be all right, John?”

“Henry Knight?”

 

Lestrade nodded. Sometimes he met John Watson for a pint after a case. Sometimes it was more necessary than others. In a different world… no. There was surely no world in all the multiverse where Sherlock Holmes met anyone for a pint. Not even someone _named_ Sherlock Holmes.

If you followed this to its conclusion, Lestrade thought (not often, but he did think it), there always had to be a Watson for a Sherlock to flourish. Someone to interface with the humans, go for pints, interpret for both sides. He’d tried, God knew, his ex knew, Mycroft knew—even Sherlock knew—that Lestrade had tried: tried to be whatever Sherlock needed for his brilliance to coalesce into something safe and focussed. But he wasn’t enough. And Lestrade had (to some extent, at times) a life of his own; he didn’t want whatever time he had outside of work to belong to Sherlock.

But it seemed, in this instance of the infinite possibility—(in which, by the way, Lestrade did not believe. Infinite to the point that there were a lot, perhaps, but not infinite infinite)—

That this John Watson wanted this Sherlock Holmes to flourish, and he might be enough. Which was why Lestrade had found himself with something he needed to say, and he was avoiding it with most of his not inconsiderable facility. 

 

The case they had just finished had enough craggy bits to talk over that Lestrade knew he could put off the thing on his mind indefinitely. Perhaps having inhaled a hallucinogen together would allow it to pass without comment, and Lestrade could just act like a fifteen-year-old girl for a moment and not have it change the nature of the friendship he had with John. 

John was eating crab salad and thinking about Henry Knight. “He didn’t seem to have much in the way of a support system in the first place, not anyone we met. I could ask Sherlock if he noticed traces of a, a girlfriend or anyone; but Henry called Dr. Mortimer when the shit was coming down, not anyone else. And she may want to get the hell out of it all.”

Lestrade recalled meeting her in the melée of police and military and outraged locals after Frankland had blown himself up and helicopters had descended on them. “Maybe I can ask the Devon cops to sic a social worker on him.”

“There can’t be many support groups for people traumatised by mad scientists.”

“He could go in with the people who survived being wrapped in bombs by Moriarty.” Something flickered across John’s face and settled into wilful calm. “Oh, God, sorry, John. I forgot that included you.”

John shrugged. “Just don’t assume I want any part of it. So. Henry. Not a great chance of being all right. You and I should write him a reference: ‘If Mr. Knight tells you he was played for years by the man who murdered his father and dosed him repeatedly with weapons-grade hallucinogenic gas, please be assured he is telling the unvarnished truth and his paranoia is not by any means unfounded. John Watson, MD. Gregory Lestrade, DI.’ “ 

“ ‘Sherlock Holmes, ID.’ ” 

John raised his eyebrows. “‘Insulting Dick’?”

“I had in mind ‘Insufferable Detective’.”

" 'Insufferable _Consulting_ Dick.’ “

“Nice,” agreed Lestrade.

“But Henry,” John continued. “He’s rich, which is a help, but he needs something to do—something he _has_ to do— or his mind may just eat itself up. That was what was happening before he came to us, after all.”

“Along with someone actively trying to drive him insane.”

“Regardless.” John waved off the part about Henry’s being the focus of an murderous chemist as though it were an everyday inconvenience and went on. “I think it’s harder to be healthy, whatever you want to call healthy, when you’ve been running in an unhealthy groove most of your life, you know?”

Lestrade nodded.

“And I mean—giant dogs and suicidal ideation and flashbacks—I don’t think Henry’s been _right_, so-called, since his dad died. Was killed. He hasn’t got much to go back and build on. Like I was, but worse.” John saw Lestrade staring at him. “I know a bit about suicidal ideation, didn’t think that was a secret.”

“You may have been wrong, John. Jesus. When you came back from the war?” Lestrade was used to more euphemism from civilians; he still forgot, sometimes, that there were other people besides coppers who couldn’t be called that.

Assuming anyone who ran with Sherlock Holmes could be called ‘a civilian’ anyway.

John nodded. “Yeah. Sherlock saved my life, I think. You know what the statistics are like for returning soldiers. I wasn’t good. My sister Harry isn’t much of a support system at best and she was getting ready to divorce when I came home; she was a mess. Sherlock, believe it or not, was very…grounding.” 

Lestrade tried to comprehend how bad off you’d have to be to find Sherlock Holmes a calming influence. Particularly the way Sherlock had been eighteen months earlier, when he’d met John. Then again:

“I knew a pair of blokes, bit like you and him. One of them shot someone to protect the other practically the first day they met. Would you have called that …grounding?” He was very careful not to meet John’s eyes; it was a touchy subject, killing, particularly if you were talking with a police officer. But that kind of difficult topic wasn’t what Lestrade wanted to discuss.

John looked guileless, in a completely unconvincing way. “Well. Killing someone is a bad thing, hardly a good way to fit back into normal society.”

“But I imagine it would either make or break a friendship. Cards on the table as to where you you stand, how you feel?”

“In a kind of schematic way, maybe,” John said. He took another mouthful of crab salad, chewed and thought for a moment. “I mean, not wanting a bad guy—I’m assuming it was a bad guy?—hurting someone, that isn’t out of the ordinary.”

“No,” agreed Lestrade. “But suppose something like that had happened with you and Sherlock—“

“Hot blood: split-second chance; either do it or not? If your shooter saw it was a choice between a bad guy or a good guy’s life, he might have just made the call, not much to do with friendship.”

“I think I felt more comfortable thinking it was friendship, affection.”

“Mad crush?” asked John, compiling the last of his salad.

“You keep saying you’re not gay.”

“It doesn’t have to be erotic every time a weedy fourth-year looks at a first-eleven sixth-former who lets him eat at the same table. Just wonderful to be noticed. You know.”

“Yeah, I do. Is that what it was like, then?”

“For about two days. Then the scales fell from my eyes and I noticed I was the adult in the room. After that we could begin to be friends. To the extent that…” John’s mouth made a flat bleak line, and he fell silent.

Lestrade went and fetched two more pints. “Here,” he said, giving one to John.

John raised his glass almost infinitesimally to Lestrade and took a swallow. “Thanks. It’s been a shitty, lousy, terrible spring so far. And I’m not about to move out or anything, but Christ, he’s a lot of work sometimes.”

“Well, I know this last case was a bugger.”

“He deliberately exposed me to a drug designed to produce more or less straight-up PTSD, as if I needed that, because he needed a control.”

Lestrade wondered what John would like him to say. “He thought you could take it? He forgets people have flaws, histories? He thought you were steady enough to BE a control?”

John smiled grimly. “You’re right. I should probably be flattered. You know another thing that drives me insane, besides weaponised aerosols? Half the time he thinks I am a sentimental fool and the other half he treats me like the same kind of scientist he is.”

“Mad?”

“No, cool, abstracted. Out there. He experiments on himself when I can’t stop him, so why wouldn’t he use me the same way?”

“That’s a hell of a compliment, really.”

“I suppose.”

“No, really.”

“I’m not scraping for them,” John said. “I’d just be satisfied with him being as rational as he wants to believe he is.”

“Isn’t he?”

“Apart from experimenting on himself? Apart from the panic attack when he realised he couldn’t actually rely on his brilliant mind not to hallucinate?” John sniffed. “And you weren’t around for much of the Irene Adler drama. I don’t really know but he went from composing pavanes for a dead dominatrix to…I have no real idea,”

“I remember her drugging him. She was the body he went to see after the Christmas party, right? And she wasn’t dead?” 

“I don’t really believe she’s dead now. You didn’t meet her, did you?”

“No, but…I did look at her website, before it was taken down,” Lestrade admitted. He could feel the blood coming into his face. “She’d melt a marble saint.”

John snorted. “She did. Sort of.”

“Sherlock? A woman?”

“Well, she was stunning—yeah, in many ways—and very clever. The way into Sherlock’s heart isn’t below his neck like most of us, but she got there. I think.”

“I wish I’d met her.”

“No, you don’t. Not as batshit crazy as Moriarty, but as manipulative as Sherlock and Mycroft put together. In better packaging and she played it for all she could, believe me. Sherlock was more interested in her mind; but he was really, really interested. And she was just as interested back, except he wanted to study her brain--I’m pretty sure—and she wanted to use him.”

Lestrade wondered if John had any idea how much he showed his own feelings about The Woman. How strong the feelings were that he had. “Did she get what she wanted?”

“I doubt very much she got another notch on her bedpost. Sherlock won the last hand, he did get into her phone in the end, but…I don’t even know any details, so it’s not that I’m not telling you; but I think it was a near thing.”

“And she’s out of the picture.”

“So I am led to believe. I don’t. If his little trip to Karachi last month didn’t have something to do with her…despite his brother trying to snow one or both of us, probably just me. I have no idea why they needed a pawn. Also, while I’m venting, I hate Mycroft. At least sometimes Sherlock is, for lack of a better word—” John paused, trying to find any kind of word. “Nice? Pleasant? No. Charming? Amusing?”

“Everyone hates Mycroft. He’s a user and a schemer because he wants to be, because it’s useful to him. It’s a way of life for Mycroft. Sherlock doesn’t…he isn’t the same way, at least not so consistently.”

“Innocent, almost,” mused John.

“That’s it. At least some of the time,” said Lestrade. “You realise we are possibly the only two people in England who would call Sherlock Holmes innocent?”

“Besides his brother, who thinks Sherlock’s an idiot because he’s only a manipulative bastard half the time. What a family.”

“You said Asperger’s, the other day,” Lestrade reminded him.

“I spoke in haste. I don’t think he’s that, and I don’t have the specialisation to say so either way in any case. Just sometimes it would be restful to push all that ‘Insufferable Consulting Detective’ we were talking about into a neat neurological label. Which wouldn’t really help when I want to pummel him, any more than it does with people who do have all the clinical signs. Of anything. No, I’m going to blame nurture—or lack of it--over nature this time; I think it takes experience to become as suspicious and hostile and defensive as those two are.”

“Blaming the parents?”

“God, yes,” John said. “Sins of omission, if nothing else, and it wasn’t ‘nothing else’. His father took off at some point, early, and his mother wasn’t much help. I have no idea who raised him; Mycroft must have left home when Sherlock was about six or seven. And Sherlock in school—“ John shook his head. “Can you imagine? I know some kids find a coterie of brothers in boarding school but—“

“Posh, yes; fitting in, no,” agreed Lestrade. “I met him after he left Cambridge and he hadn’t been happy there, either.”

“I met one of his…contemporaries from Cambridge last year. I’d have taken to drugs myself.”

“Privileged scum?”

“Investment banker.”

“There you are, then.” They drank for a moment in silence. “And yet Sherlock trusts you,” Lestrade said. “He’s not quite too damaged. And you must be special. I thought it was, ah, the drama of the Study in Pink case.” 

John shook his head. “He was almost as pleased about my limp going away as I was, so he liked having that reminder of his cleverness—his goodness—around. And the drama, as you put it—he said something approving about my managing to get you lot to the college as soon as I did”—Lestrade admired the way John was almost managing his tells—“but I think he was more surprised someone stuck around as his flatmate than that someone would kill to protect him. Hypothetically. I mean, Sherlock is aware that as normal, everyday pains in the arse go, he’s more annoying than a murderous cabbie. Over a longer term.”

“Yet there you are.”

“I like him,” John said resentfully. Then he shrugged and smiled. “Enough of the time, I guess. So do you; you understand why I stay.”

Lestrade contemplated the understatement, decided to meet it. “I do like him. I couldn’t live with him myself, but I’m grateful you can.” He paused, inhaled, plunged. “He likes you. He more than likes you.”

John wasn’t too bothered. “Christ, you as well? The innkeepers wanted to know our china pattern, and so does everyone else. I keep saying it isn’t like that.”

“John.”

“What?”

“What if it were like that?” 

“Are we really talking about this?” Initialise: **bother**. Execute.

“Just for a minute. Hypothetically.”

“Why?” Whatever reprieve John had had from anxiety at that supper was over. Lestrade was astonished at the speed John clamped shutters over himself. Damn. It was not going to be welcome news, if John even stayed long enough for Lestrade to speak. 

Lestrade thought about all the ways he didn’t want to queer Sherlock’s pitch, to alter what was a relatively healthy system. But it was only relatively healthy, and the certainty had grown on Lestrade over the past year that Sherlock was smitten far beyond his wretched—unpracticed?--emotional capabilities. He exhaled.

“Because I’ve never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. Because IF Sherlock ever fell in love, it would most likely upset his sense of the rightness of things, of himself, even more than seeing giant glowing dog-beasts from hell; and I would want someone he trusts as much as you to walk him through it. And I’m sorry to dump this on you, John. I know you don’t welcome—but I know you’re not a bigot. And you need to be aware.” _Because, come down to it, I care for him more than I do you, and I worry about him, and I don’t give a damn if it makes you uncomfortable._

John had shoved his plate aside before Lestrade finished speaking, focussed somewhere far away. One of his hands clenched and unclenched, apparently without his volition. “I really don’t. You have no idea what you’re asking,” he said at last.

“I’m sorry,” Lestrade said again. “I didn’t mean to ask you for anything.” So untrue. _Hey, John, if there’s anything of your own that Sherlock hasn’t employed, demanded, taken over; any pocket of yours he hasn’t picked; any last places he’s left untouched in your life or your mind [or your body]: could you just map them out for him and hand them over?_

Lestrade knew he ought to say the usual things, about how possibly he was wrong, how of course John knew Sherlock better than he did, about how John’s in situ instincts were probably more accurate than Lestrade’s spot-checks; but Lestrade didn’t believe any of that. He would never have risked this conversation if he had. “Is this really news to you?” 

“Yes. Mostly. Christ Almighty. Yes. I don’t know.” John rubbed his face again. “Damn. If we were talking before Irene Adler, I’d have said—no, I have no idea what I’d’ve said, but…if anything, she’d have been—only, no. Jesus.” It was interesting to watch the wheels spinning in a mind more like his own than Sherlock’s was, Lestrade thought. John was no fool, no idiot of any kind. Not wheels, more like—meteorites of information raising dust, rattling data into new arrangements. Killing perfectly innocent dinosaurs just trying to get on with their lives in peace. 

At last John looked back at Lestrade. “I am going to hope to God you’re wrong.”

Damn it. He’d never thought John Watson was a coward.

“You’re going to think I’m a selfish clod, but every time someone says we’re a couple I’ve only thought of myself,” John said. “And believe me, that’s been enough. I do not date men.” 

And now there were tells all over him. Sherlock could probably have read them. All Lestrade could see, from his years as a copper, was that there was something up this particular tree. Lestrade was not trying to make an arrest, an enemy out of a friend. He consciously dropped his shoulders, took his eyes from John’s face. “Apart from liking women, which I know you do—” _your heterosexual privilege will not be compromised by any statement you care to make_ — “any particular reason….?” Lestrade let his voice trail off. _This is not an interrogation, this is an opportunity._

John didn’t seem to be taking it. Lestrade let the silence sit, not as long as he would have professionally but longer than, say, his ex-wife (who had explained non-cop, civilian courtesy to him more often and with less patience than John ever would to Sherlock) would have deemed polite. “Anyway,” Lestrade said, caving, “I was talking about Sherlock, not you. You seem to want to protect him. If I’m right you might want to keep an eye open.”

“How would I begin to be careful of his feelings when he notices every move I make and why? He’ll notice me watching, now. You don’t imagine we’re going to have a cozy chat about it, do you?”

“I imagined that you would do better with some warning that feelings might be involved. Come, on, John, are you as unobservant as he’s always saying? How can you not have noticed? He makes certain you get food even though he won’t eat during a case himself. He barely tries to impress me anymore; he waits for you to tell him his deductions are amazing—they are, and I don’t blame him for liking to hear you say so—but his eyes follow you from fifty metres away. It makes talking to him even harder. And you’re the only one he asks—ASKS, to—” Lestrade sorted hurriedly to find a word without sexual connotations “—impinge on his personal space. He’s not keen on touching—”

“No, he isn’t. If you want neurology I will bet all I have on sensory overload issues, why he notices everything the way he does—“

“That’s all well and good but I just don’t want you to break his heart by accident.”

“Oh, Christ, Greg, now I’ll be breaking it on purpose, thank you so much.” John pushed his chair back and dropped ten quid on the table. “I need air, I’m sorry.”

“John, I’m sorry, I didn’t—didn’t mean to drive you away, didn’t want—but—” Shit. 

“No, don’t worry, Greg, it’s not—look, he’s…whatever—himself—and I’m damaged, and we do just fine this way and I know you care about both of us, well mostly him but that’s all right, he’s higher maintenance and worth more and any other sentient being would be delighted, except not me. Probably see you next week unless the criminals take a spring mini-break, don’t worry, all right? Just. Really, fine. Bye.”

Lestrade watched him go, wondering what he had seen and heard before John’s departure--more likely what he had missed was more important. Wondering whether they'd ever have an unguarded conversation again. He hoped so. He drank his beer. After a while, he drank the last half of John’s and went home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John has a reason for not dating men.

The night air was soothing to my fight-or-flight response; I took the long walk home, wondering how many things had impelled me away from that conversation. I didn’t want to listen to Greg, because I usually trusted his take on people, and there was nothing I wanted to say. The pounding from inside my ribs just told me to run. Once I was outside I could breathe, and try to think my way through the panic. 

I’d been calm about this sort of thing once. I had to be, but I knew it wasn’t my desires that were the problem. I was lucky enough to be certain of that.

From the time I was old enough to pay attention, I’d known there were things you didn’t say, though that was changing at least in some places.

I realised very soon that if, after you had said the first unsayable thing, you added that it wasn’t as simple as that, then people you trusted would pound you. People who should have known better how strange people can be, saying ‘no one could be that complicated, you won’t pick a side, you’re confused you’re wrong you’re a foil for the people who hate us you’re one of them—.’ I’d seen it happen more than once to braver people [stupider people] and I wanted no part of it. Harry had a bad enough time simply loving women. Desire bloomed in me late enough I’d already realised that liking both men and women was just not okay with most of the people I knew. 

They did seem to think diffidence and caution were good qualities: ‘John doesn’t rush into things, looks before he leaps.’ With Harry’s assertions of her personhood being measurable by seismologists in China—not just her sexuality; Harry did everything loudly and in vivid colour—anyone with sense would have developed protective coloration, caution, diffidence. My life as a kid had been unremarkable until Harry came out, when suddenly there was a lot more fighting in the schoolyard. At least when she finally explained to my parents, they understood why I’d been coming home with black eyes and notes from the headmaster. Harry wasn’t best pleased that I was defending her honour, but one night I finally explained that having a gay sibling meant I had my own skin to look after. She went pale, not having realised before then that anything she did might make people look at me differently. I never told her that the name-calling was also accurate enough. I don’t think she wanted that kind of solidarity with me, and by some accounts I was still the enemy anyway. 

Well before the army, I had enough experience to know I was as complicated as I’d feared. And known some very decent men, one of them well enough that we could laugh about the awkwardness of meeting in the on-call room alone together and then weeks later at the pub with women alongside us.  
I’d believed myself in love a couple of times, with Diane when I was sixteen and with Karen, drastically, at university. I was a good boyfriend; it seemed to me that cheating was cheating, and I didn’t want that to be my style. I didn’t feel any more need for a man’s touch than I did for that of any passing pretty woman, so for the length of those relationships I found faithfulness very possible (much more than Karen apparently did). 

The rest of my life began to lose some of its caution, though. Rotation in Belfast was medically, surgically challenging, but what the gunfire and the hostility and the danger did to my cautious persona was appalling. I knew enough to keep the drink in check and I’d learned in uni to avoid gambling for money, but the pull of risking my life was more intoxicating and exciting than either. I loved the army, the closer to the trouble the better. In the moment no one was bothered with anything except survival, and it sharpened life to a point. Afterward there WAS an after, and knowing how easily I might not have had one made it sweet. Maybe attacking your own is easier when no one is attacking all of you literally, because there were plenty of men (and some women, not many, because there weren’t many there in the first place) who were happy with anyone who wanted to hold them, and never said a word if you were holding someone one shape one week and another when you went on leave. There might have been people in the army with enough time to debate sexual politics, but I only knew people who were eager to vote, anytime they could.

And I’d never before felt I was on a team, part of a body bigger than my own. In the heat of the moment, an absolutely mindless, heartless, moral calculation could move someone to die for another; it was what you did for the men fighting beside you. We took chances in Afghanistan our families at home would never, ever understand, because there it was very easy to get to a place where you’d risk your life almost for fun. Almost for honour, if you like; if you think honour means not letting the other guy get away with whatever he was trying on. A footballer’s honour, I think, not a gentleman’s.

I’d shot the cabbie from that state of mind, not from a sudden great swelling of warmth for Sherlock—I was inclined to favour him, definitely, because such complete prats and pissants seemed to think he didn’t deserve friends--but it was simpler and colder than that. Mycroft had said I’d become ‘very loyal, very quickly’ to his brother, but that was the way things went in the war. The teams were clear, no mind or heart required. If I looked back at that evening now and shuddered, it was because I could see now how close to the war I’d still been. 

Violent death in London was different. Every murder scene was carefully searched, graphed, recorded exactly as it hadn’t been in Afghanistan; every violent death carefully treated to re-enforce belief that such a thing was not normal. Despite all the hype about unattended parcels on the Tube, and exceptions like the one Moriarty had made in Glasgow, I lived in a blessed place where death did not wait inside a carton or alongside the road. 

Mycroft was utterly wrong. London was not a battlefield. I’d die, happy in mind and heart, to keep it from becoming one. 

And, it seemed, I would live happy in mind and heart with Sherlock Holmes. Even though he made it difficult, sometimes simply because he wanted to, sometimes because he couldn’t help it, and sometimes because he couldn’t be bothered not to. And I would stay because I

—because I had a lot of complicated reasons

—or maybe just because I didn’t want to miss what happened next, the safety or unsafety of London or Sherlock or myself having little to do with it.

 

And if your team starts to become an unsafe place? _“I’ve never seen him look at anybody the way he looks at you.”_ Greg knew him. Greg couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed. Greg had no idea how much I would never want to notice.

I knew who I was. 

I knew who I had been. Oh, God, that man was dead, please be dead, please. 

I knew I couldn’t be anyone real without including, integrating, my past experience into my present. [ _Yes Ella I do listen; do you have any idea what you’re asking? Does it matter? I know you’re right. I don’t like you, but that’s not the point at all._ ] Integrating the man I’d been the day before yesterday, the man I’d been a month ago, the man I’d been a year ago. Almost three years ago. Two years, eleven months, and five days.

That man had wanted to die. No, like all of us, I’d wanted to live, but that explosion—it wasn’t the last one, not nearly—killed the life I was living as surely as it had Neal and Arjun. As it killed Jason, though he didn’t die that day. I kept the life in him because it was what I did, the values I’d accepted. I told myself while I was tying off arteries that life—any kind of life—was worth preserving, though neither he nor I had believed that when we were whole. He didn’t live more than another day. He would not have liked what he had become. I told myself that while I was crying. 

 

That philosopher we studied in sixth form said that objects obey the will of God by following the laws of physics; living things, by adapting to their environment; humans, by relating to one as other not as objects, but as other persons. 

Jason was only an object when he died; no living system could adapt to such ruin. We had been people once, persons in relation. Sexual relation, if you want to be funny, but other kinds no less, which was why we were different from the other pairs of living beings, adapting to our environment, in sexual relations. In a war.  
I think we were different. Some of the others were pretending they were in love. We were pretending we weren’t: not to one another; just to everyone else. He was American. I don’t know who he didn’t tell; there must have been more than a few who didn’t ask. He spent only the time that he had to with his own. We were one another’s own for perhaps a month, if you added up the nights. When Jason’s pulse beneath my hands was so warm, so fast because of where our hands were upon one another. Our blood where it belonged: separate, in concert, not contact. 

He was one of a hundred soldiers in pieces under my hands while I was there, maybe more than a hundred, certainly no fewer. Not the only one whose body I had touched living and whole, either. The only one whose heart had touched mine. 

You don’t get to think about it when it happens, so I kept him alive that day. When I cried because he was dead I tried to know both my ‘saving’ him and his escaping from that broken life were right, were what needed to happen, that we had both done our bit. 

Our bit, before it happened: patrolling. 

My bit, afterward: assessing his injuries, accepting his blood all over me, trying to keep enough of it inside him. 

His bit, finally: being unconscious, shutting down one process after another. At least his family didn’t have to decide to turn off life-support. Biology, chemistry, physics made the decision, as if they had free will to follow the laws of nature or not to.

 

It was more than a year later that the bullet in my shoulder carried me out of the army. I’d ceased to be a person in relation to other persons, but I was a living thing and I was very well adapted to my environment. I’d stopped being in anything but the most superficial relationship with anyone, which was fine. It worked. I worked, very well, and no one seemed to notice.

When I got to London I no longer worked very well. I didn’t adapt to my new environment. I was a Newtonian object following the laws of physics, coasting, pushed into action on occasion, having less and less impulse of my own. Wanting to come to a stop. I moved only because it would have been more trouble to resist the appointments, the assembly line for invaliding out of the army, into civilian life. 

I supposed Sherlock was as Newtonian a body as anyone else. But his orbit was eccentric, his whole life was knocking people out of their usual sphere (mixing scientific paradigms, I know. Leave my metaphors alone) and I was drifting in space when Stamford crossed our paths and Sherlock captured me in his gravitational field. But somehow he made me alive again, and human, and though the relationship was cautious it was as real and personal as I could stand. 

 

It was late and I was sober when I stepped softly into 221b. I needn’t have worried about waking Sherlock, of course. He was doing something unspeakable to something inedible in the kitchen, but a moment after my muttered greeting he looked up. Then he stripped off his gloves, put the kettle on. 

“Do I look that bad?” I asked.

“Usually when I reply to questions like that you tell me to bugger off.” He pushed the lid onto the (new, expensive, BPA-free) plastic box (that I had bought to keep large flat leftovers in) and put it into the fridge. “I’ll buy you another container. These are very useful. Umm. Sorry?”

“You’re not, and I should have bought two and covered one with biohazard tape in the first place.” I moved into the kitchen as the kettle shuddered to its finish, but Sherlock blocked me and warmed the teapot himself. “That bad, really?”

He shrugged and glanced at me again, his eyes colour of champagne made for robots: grey, clear, glittering. Observation. Concerned. There was no point in denying it; he could see better and faster than I could dissimulate.

“You may as well say it, then I’ll know as much about me as you do,” I said.

“Lestrade doesn’t usually ask you about the war.”

“I don’t think he meant to.”

He opened the cupboard and very deliberately did not choose my army mug. He picked the one with the remark about about not leaving parentheses open: I was to remember I was his blogger.

“You don’t usually think about people who died. Well. Every time you read the newspaper. This person.”

I nodded. It would almost’ve been good to have it known, to have Sherlock know who I was, who I’d been. It would’ve been better not to have pried the lid off at all, though. Wasn’t the Kubler-Ross merry-go-round supposed to stop sometime?

Sherlock moved faster and faster among the tea things, his hands ripping through the biscuit wrapper. Oh. Food, because paracetamol before bed-time. I must have looked really rough. Was he going to ask?

“A patient?”

“Only at the end.”

With that he must have known everything he needed to. And I didn’t think it had come as a surprise; I wondered how long he’d known. But then I saw him stop just long enough to inhale before he handed me my cup; just long enough to layer composure over the uncertainty in his bearing. An entirely different man from the one who had believed he was giving me drugged coffee a week ago.

Would I have noticed that, before what Greg had told me that day? Would I have guessed why Sherlock might be shaken? 

Would anything less than that wave of old sorrow have papered over what Greg and I actually did discuss? (What Greg tried to discuss.)

Had it? Did my friend who knew nothing (and who assured us all that he cared less) about people’s emotions know what had knocked me into reopening a locked room in my history? I’d believed myself in love before the army, with two different women; never more than appreciation and cheerful lust for any man. Until Jason, in an unreal life for both of us, and then a real death.

I didn’t date men because they died. It was stupid, yes; women died in Afghanistan, too. And they died in London just as often as the men. But none I’d held before and after. 

 

_Sherlock, I can’t be a lover. Don’t ask that of me. I haven’t asked it of you and I’ve silenced any voice that might have wanted to._ Protecting myself, protecting him as well if I thought about it.

“Mrs. Hudson would hug you.” He wasn’t being scornful. Tentative. Apologetic? “I suppose Molly would ask if you wanted to talk about it but Lestrade did and you didn’t want to—“

“It’s all right, Sherlock, I’d much rather have a cup of tea than anything else. Really. Thanks.”

He pushed past me, taking his tea toward his armchair. I followed. He did something on the open laptop—mine as usual--and handed it to me before he sat down. “I’ve sent you a link. String quartet tomorrow night?”

He had thoughtfully logged into my e-mail for me. The string quartet were four very lovely women. “They aren’t playing your usual fare.” 

“They’re technically acceptable. One of them offered me tickets and I owe her a favour. I thought you might enjoy it.”

He’d sent me the link less than a minute earlier. If this was a gesture to Cheer John Up it was one of his more graceful. “I think I would.”

“You have hours at the clinic tomorrow? We’ll have dinner after, then we’ll investigate modern appropriation of classical models where all is transposition and altered time-signatures and there’ll be no silver-haired policemen to annoy us with impertinent observations.”

“Unless he calls with a case.” I drank the tea, and reached deeply into my gut for breath. Sherlock stood back up, found his own computer, fussed. Caution and diffidence were unusual to see in Sherlock. He was sill waiting for something, me to break into tears or... . I didn’t like it. “I surprised Lestrade.”

“Not hard. How in particular?”

“We were talking about Henry Knight and I said I knew something about suicidal ideation. He hadn’t known how badly off I was when I moved in here.”

“Lestrade is much too polite to wonder about mental health unless he feels professionally obliged.”

“Did you know?” I asked.

“I didn’t expect your leg to respond so well, so quickly, to a challenge. Wouldn’t have taken that route if it hadn’t, obviously. But I didn’t know how low you had been until you began attacking my standards of experimental hygiene. When you plainly felt much livelier than before.”

I remembered that evening well and couldn’t help smiling. “Fingertips don’t belong with the butter.”

“I know that, now.” He managed to look both amused and still put-upon by my provinciality.

“I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you,” I said, reading my mail. 

“Every day,” he answered. It wasn’t the dismissal I’d expected, but he stopped fussing and drank his tea and explained why the science journalist in the _Times_ needed remedial tutoring in O-level biology.

 

And the next evening, just that once, nothing happened until after the last encore. I took a picture of Sherlock with lipstick on his face from being greeted by the second violin; he wiped it off before we had to meet Lestrade. It seems there was a kidnapped banker… .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There really is a string quartet composed of lovely women, and Sherlock really does owe the second violin a favor.
> 
> The philosopher John studied in sixth-form is John MacMurray, and he is very readable.


End file.
